We can’t help but be shaped by the places we live and frequent.

For artist Annalee Davis, that’s Barbados, a southern Caribbean nation first colonized by the British in 1627 and used as its first sugarcane plantation experiment.

The small island was transformed into a monocrop worked by imported indentured and enslaved labor to create a sugar revolution and make money for Europe, Davis says. The island finally gained its independence from the United Kingdom in 1966 and became a republic in 2021.

“I’m really interested in the plantation,” Davis said. “It has impacted every aspect of our lives in terms of race, class and gender, but it’s had a massive impact environmentally. By the third quarter of the 17th century, most of our biodiversity was wiped out because we are quite a flat island. It was easy to clear a forest and create plantations with fields of sugarcane.”

Davis’ family has lived on a Barbadian plantation for more than a century. It’s no longer a sugarcane plantation, but now a dairy farm run by her brother. She grew up on the land as a little girl and has lived there for the last quarter of a century.

“I’ve been reckoning with the plantation for almost 40 years,” she said. “I’m grappling with a complex and difficult history, and I’m trying to understand that and my place in the world.”

Her first solo museum exhibit in the U.S., “Annalee Davis: More Tender Geographies,” features more than 30 works from the last decade of her practice that explore her relationship to the island. It opens Friday with a free reception at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College.

Reflections on some of the projects that make up her new exhibit

• “How to Be Curious About a Land,” dried and pressed plants from Davis’ garden, including sugar cane, banana, sea grapes, breadfruit and mahogany: “This is foraging in the soil, garden and land around where I live on the farm. I’ve been interested in the idea of how to have a more intimate relationship with a landscape that has been mediated for four centuries by the plantation. One of the issues of the plantation is that we’ve become estranged from the living world. We’re all living through this ecological crisis at the moment. I’m interested in seeing if I can draw viewers into being curious about these grasses, vines, leaves and pods, to generate an interest in the living world.”

• “As if the Entanglement of Our Lives Did Not Matter,” paintings: “In this work, there is a better sense of the impact of the plantation on families. For example, on the far right, this is a portrait of a family who were not allowed to live together. The woman in the red dress was 20. She fell in love with a man 17 years her senior, but he was born in 1870, and he was called colored. The woman was a poor white woman, and her family didn’t approve. She got pregnant and was not allowed to marry him. Her little girl was given to her sister to raise. The little girl is my maternal grandmother. And the woman in red is my maternal great-grandmother. The man is my maternal great-grandfather. I’ve brought them together in a family portrait in a way they weren’t allowed to live together.”

• “Solastalgia: Geologies of Grief,” 19-minute sound piece recorded in a Barbados limestone cave 160 feet below ground with musicians Simon Pipe, Jomo Slusher and Marcel Jean-Baptiste on trombone, conch shell and djembe drum: “Solastalgia means homesickness in the place we’re living. So not nostalgia, or pining for something you lost. The level of transformation to the landscapes we’re currently inhabiting is so radical that we are feeling this disorientation from the landscapes. I wanted them (the musicians) to respond to the darkness and geology of this fixed landscape that could be seen as a refuge. The sound pieces are ideas around how to consider this extinction we’re living through, so they’re mournful chants in a way.”

• “Second Spring Series,” paintings, 2019: “I was going through menopause and thinking about that massive shift. I brought in plantation ledger pages I found in an abandoned bookkeeper’s house. They’re from the 1970s and ’80s. They’re plantation ledger pages where wages were noted. Because women’s value is very much tied to reproduction — our ability to reproduce, and to reproduce labor, and a lot of it is free labor. She’s reckoning with this huge change in life and also with the patriarchal narrative around aging women as dried-up prunes no longer having value, while men are (called) silver foxes. There’s the idea of tapping into the inner wildness, and I have found menopause to be freeing and a profoundly energizing and amazing period of life, and it just gets better.”

• “Post Reproductive Breasts Sprouting New Life,” large-scale embroidered textile, (2024-2026): “These breasts that are just reproducing and reproducing. These droopy breasts that we’re supposed to have so much shame about and their capacity to produce in other ways, like being creative.”

• “(bush) Tea Services,” glazed Barbadian clay, 18th- and 19th-century clay and porcelain shards, 2016: “It’s looking at tea, which was the most-drunk beverage in Britain after water. In the Caribbean practices of bush tea, bush medicine and bush math, enslaved Africans had small plots of land where they would grow provisions to feed themselves but also plants for medicines and poisons, so this is remaking a tea service referring to the British tea service but it was a very imperfect tea service. I would serve tea, but I inserted these shards so when I would pour it, it would drip, and when you drank from the cups it was messy and like the leakages of history.”

If you go

What: “Annalee Davis: More Tender Geographies”

When: Opening reception 5-8 p.m. Friday, runs through Dec. 5

Where: Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College, 30 W. Dale St.

Price: Free opening reception, $5-$10 regular admission; 719-634-5581, fac.coloradocollege.edu